#Ogden nash quip free#

As we set off from home into the freezing outer world, all sorts of emotional accommodations must be discharged.Ĭoncision in its broadest spirit encompasses far more than a stripping of verbiage. And there’s anguish and vulnerability in the implication that the stick has been transferred because Father has died-recently, within the past year. There’s comfort in the notion that Father is sheltering us with that stolid stick of his. In a mere seventeen syllables, the poem evokes a complex, compromised psychological condition. The most touching English-language haiku I know belongs to Seamus Heaney: A single entity-a couple-devolves into a pared, shared falling away. Departing, remaining-in either case, it’s a loss, the season of loss.

The separation referred to may be a literal two years. Here’s an especially terse example by Buson (translated by Robert Hass): I’m partial to haiku, particularly when they intimate a far larger story than they tell. On a graver note-as grave as humankind is capable of-what about “Jesus wept”? Surely, the shortest verse in the Bible may be the most affecting. The poem actually offers a “criticism of life”-Matthew Arnold’s touchstone for poetry that addresses the “spirit of our race.” Doesn’t it say, in effect, Why fuss over minor annoyances, as we’ve been doing since the beginning of time, given that complaining has done nothing to alleviate our lot? (From a technical standpoint the poem is, I suppose, an absolutely regular trochaic monometric couplet.) But there’s more. And it does so with-another hallmark of light verse-a polished finish. One of Gillilan’s specialties was light verse, and a sympathetic reader will remark on how the poem, brief as it is, formally does what good light verse typically does: with its unlikely rhyme, it smoothes seeming clumsiness (“Had ’em”) into antic dexterity. (I’m tempted wildly to declare it the shortest successful poem in any language.) Here it is in its entirety: (The story gets complicated: Gillilan did not call it “Fleas”-it’s unclear who first did-and Ogden Nash was apparently credited because he ought to have written it.) In any case, it must be the shortest successful poem in the language. Pride of place belongs to the author of “Fleas,” a poem often attributed to Ogden Nash but actually written by Strickland Gillilan. I like epigrams, miniatures, punch lines, and I keep a sort of mental cabinet of clipped curiosities. While a love for poetry may seem inseparable from a love for words, I feel a special fondness for the poem (or quip, or short story) that gets the job done while using them-words-sparingly. It says, Boy, leisure time must hang heavy over your head. And, Have you stopped to consider the uselessness of what you’re doing? And, often, Adults do get up to absolutely asinine things, don’t they?Ĭoncision. In a minimum of space, it speaks volumes.

#Ogden nash quip free#

At one point he was said to have had more than 70 relatives on the payroll, causing poet Ogden Nash to quip in verse, 'Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle.'' - Legacy.Whoa, free time. On the lot he was affectionately referred to as Uncle Carl – though with his penchant for nepotism, for many the moniker wasn’t a nickname. 'His was the only studio that allowed tourists to visit (a practice that has evolved into a $100 million annual business with Universal Theme Parks in Los Angeles, Orlando and Osaka, Japan). To see a Universal News clip featuring Laemmle defending Roosevelt's NRA, click here. He also unsuccessfully tried to save the Jewish refugees aboard the S.S. and lobbying the Congress and the State Department to let them in. Laemmle was also the publicist behind Hollywood’s first film star, Florence Lawrence, for whom he got newspaper attention in 1910 by planting and then retracting a story that she’d been killed by a streetcar! In the 1930s, Laemle sponsored hundreds of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, paying their emigration and immigration expenses to the U.S. He had a hand in the creation of some 400 films in the course of his career (Universal’s most enduring contributions were Showboat and the classic horror films of the 1930s, by which time Laemmle’s son Carl Jr. Laemmle (pronounced lem-lee) was one of the first entrepreneurs to buy up nickelodeons and create a film-distribution network (which involved major legal battles with Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the motion picture camera) before merging his operation with several others to create Universal. Universal Pictures was incorporated on this date in 1912 by Carl Laemmle, a German-born pioneer of the American film industry.